


This Beautiful Delusional Career

by Sour_Idealist



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Anachronic Order, Ancestor-Era, Backstory, Cannibalism, F/F, F/M, Gen, Post-Glub, Pre-Scratch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-09
Updated: 2012-01-09
Packaged: 2017-10-29 07:19:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/317177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sour_Idealist/pseuds/Sour_Idealist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She has ruled absolute for all of living memory. (Her memory.)</p><p>Alternately: Empresses are born to be made.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Beautiful Delusional Career

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nidorina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nidorina/gifts).



> This is an unfortunately late Ladystuck treat for Funkcandy, who requested "some Condesce sadstuck." It ended up rather darker than I intended; on that note, **warnings for gore and cannibalism.** I... really hope it isn't too unsettling!

**SOME TIME AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD**

Her footsteps echo through the hallways of the ship as they have always done. The engine room is stained, filthy mustard the color of shit defiling her own rich purple. (It’s the color gold would go if it could tarnish, and the purple has faded with the dead-space years; it’s the color, now, of an old old bruise. The ship-flesh around the spinal column is darker, rotting faster, the color her heirs have turned just shortly after death.)

She scrapes her talons over the dried blood, steps through the door, knowing that flakes of it will settle in her hair. She looks at the bones hanging across the room, unmoving, and she does not allow herself to look away until she tastes her own blood on her mouth, her tongue bitten. It tastes almost as salty as her oceans, but not quite. The flavor lingers on her tongue as at last she turns her back, walks away.

The halls are empty. No bones here, no blood, nothing but the endless dust swirling up around her. She’s cleared it all away, but it did not take her long to learn how quickly dust comes back. And she will not sweep and scrub; she is the Empress.

The lights brighten before her, dim behind her, all that she has left to command.

 **CENTURIES IN THE PAST, AND MANY**

Her hair is fresh-washed and still damp, like the shoreline after a storm, and it spills down her back as it always has. She stands in her engine room, makes sure that every tie and zipper on her suit is done and tidied, settles her trident carefully against the wall. It is her best, her most formal; the tines are freshly sharpened, and every line of the grip and every curlicue is as bright as it was the day it was delivered to her palace freshly forged.

“I hope you appreciate this,” she tells the corpse on the far wall. He scarcely seems different, yet, except that his head hangs limp, his limbs are slack, and an observer might imagine him defeated. The thought makes her want to tear out someone’s throat, but fortunately there are no such misinformed souls to observe. (Unfortunately, this means she cannot in fact kill anyone for the crime.) “I haven’t honored many like this, you know, and the lowest one in all my life was teal.”

He doesn’t move. Of course he doesn’t move. He’s dead. She pulls a knife out of her belt – it’s polished, shining, just as the trident is. “It’s probably disgustingly improper,” she continues, lifetimes' worth of practice keeping her voice steady, “but you were a good servant, in the end.” She sniffs the air; he’s still fresh. Obviously. It hasn’t been long.

It wouldn’t matter if he weren’t.

“My finest servant in a very long time,” she proclaims, and makes the first cut, starting with his shoulder. She peels the cloth away from him, makes the cut clean and cups the flesh in her palms. The heat of the ship has kept him warm, even, although not as warm as he was in life – disgusting, beautiful lowblood – and he’s tangy, spicy, as he fills her mouth. The meat is tough. Good.

“Perhaps my very best,” she tells him, and cuts another bite. She is not crying, but she has resigned herself to the possibility.

 **CENTURIES IN THE PAST, AND MORE**

For these two, the Condesce will visit her prisons, inland and underground and dank. It’s freshwater and mold, unfamiliar and less pleasant than even sewage-tainted ocean, but her prison-keepers are good folk, and so she only wrinkles her nose, keeps the full depths of her disgust hidden. The corridors have been swept clear for her, along the centers; the dirt lies piled in between the cages’ bars.

The first of the prisoners to notice the Empress is the stocky little troll with the wild hair and the teeth like a fish from the sunless depths. She scrabbles to her feet in a storm of dust and scattered straw, grabs at the bars and spits. It actually hits, spattering across her cheek and shoulder in a mess of filthy low green; she’s too surprised to be angry, or even appalled.

“Hey!” The troll next to her shakes himself to standing too, shrugging under the wrecked remains of his cloak. His coal-red eyes glow in the darkness. “Come on, nooksniffer, don’t,” he urges, voice as warm as his unnatural blood, “we don’t have to let them get to us, we can do this without letting go of the dreams, we’re gonna be just fucking fine.”

The greenblood tilts her head, then bites her lip, sighs and reaches for his hand, covering his where it’s wrapped around the bars between them. The cells are small enough for her to reach, and easily. He brushes his thumb across the cracked and bloody ruin of her knuckles.

“You really did mean _everybody,_ huh,” she murmurs; if the cells didn’t echo, the Empress wouldn’t hear, but as it is the words are as clear as the hillbilly accent roughening the edges of them, as the soft _mrr_ noise the girl makes as her companion’s thumb keeps stroking. She smiles at him, and it’s sad, her eyes damp, but the Condesce has seen enough false smiles to recognize that this one is too messy and off-center to be anything but real.

She says nothing, simply drums her fingers against her trident and waits for their attention to shift. It’s been a very, very long time since she was not the center of a room.

Finally the greenblood turns back, sighing softly. “Sorry, sister,” she mumbles, fishing a filthy scrap of handkerchief out of one pocket of her ragged coat. She tosses it through the bars, a wide slow arc, easily caught; the Condesce snatches it like it’s an arrow.

“You _dare –”_ She stops, watches her prisoner watch her, bitter and sad and nothing else in the world except perhaps a bit regretful. Yes. Yes, she does dare.

 **CENTURIES IN THE PAST, BEYOND COUNTING**

The young Empress surfaces in her chambers in a crash of water and rapidly-discarded jewelry, drips spattering across the tiles as she rings out her hair. Spare rings, the ones she only wears for office, clatter to the floor.

“Your patience is appreciated, Anilet!” she chirps to the woman lounging in a chair beyond the rims of the pool, flipping through a well-worn book the Condesce does not remember seeing. Her matespirit creases a corner, tugs her glasses down her nose and smiles over their thick black rims.

“Good to see you again, dearie,” Anilet drawls, standing in a rustle of silk, and glides across the room. The Condesce stretches out her hands, standing just a little straighter from teaching rapidly becoming indistinguishable from instinct, and the other troll kisses one palm, then the other, then steps in to kiss her mouth. Her hands slide under the tangles of the Condesce’s hair.

The Condesce feels something thin and cold pressing against her back.

She swallows.

“Whale, this is a sudden quadrant switch.”

Anilet laughs, thin and a little sad; the corners of her deep-violet eyes are damp. “I really am sorry about this, Your Condescension,” she says, leaning in to kiss her lips again, light and gentle, “but such are the ways of politics.” One more kiss, and she says, as gently as she once said _no one sees how beautifully, preciously pathetic you are the way I do, do they, darling?_ she says, “You’re just too weak, love.”

Five minutes later the guards enter to find their Empress seated on her chamber floor, violet and fuchsia streaking together in her hair, the head of her matespirit cradled in her lap. She’s running her fingers along one pretty delicate earfin, gentle and tender.

When she sees the guards, she stands.

“Take that away,” she orders, gesturing at the corpse spilled across the floor in a tangle of intestines, knife still clutched in its fingers. “This too.” She hands the first one the head hesitantly, fingers smoothing back the hair one more time before she lets it go. “Have them thrown on the refuse pile. Make sure as many people as possible see you do it.”

 **BEFORE MOST OF RECORDED HISTORY**

“Whale, if it’s so fantastic out with all the rest of your tentacley friends,” the Empress-to-be grumbles, folding her hands behind her head as she lies back against one of G’lbgolyb’s infinite legs, feet braced against the edge of a sucker, “why don’t you live with them?” Her lusus’s glow washes over her, turning her fingers as pale as ancient bone, and her hair in the water looks like some of the more painfully poisonous kinds of seaweed. She closes her eyes as the currents stir around her.

 _I am weak compared to most of them, little princess_ , G’lbgolyb tells her, something sad in the boom of her not-quite-voice. It only pounds through her daughter’s head a little bit; the horrorterror is being considerate tonight. Or reluctant. A drift of bubbles tickles the troll girl’s nose, tendrils unfurling around her as she opens her eyes, and the thinnest tiniest tip of a tentacle brushes tenderly along her cheek. _It is a very, very bad thing to be weak, and very painful. It is better to be here and to be hungry, or not to be at all._

“Okay,” the girl who will be the Condesce says, bites her lip hard enough to sting. Faint streams of pink swirl from her mouth out through the depths, vanishing as they drift beyond the monster’s glow. “I understand.” Hesitantly, she strokes the tentacle beneath her. “You’re strong here, at least!” The water swallows her thin little voice.

 _I know._ Tentacle-tips brush against her wrists, the touch lighter than the shifting of the currents around them. She keeps her head high and does not shiver while G’lbgolyb’s caress twines around her arms, around her shoulder, looping delicately around her throat. The monster doesn’t understand how bodies work, the Condesce has learned, when they’re as small as her. _I know. It is good._

 **IN A TIME THAT NEVER WAS**

In a land full of sugar and seaweed, mixing together in misshapen and melting heaps and hills, a girl in a ragged-green coat folds her arms and glares up at her friend. The other girl lowers her chin and stares coolly back, regal in spite of the mud and soaked sugar-slime soaking into the hem of her rich pink skirt.

“You’re like all the worst parts of a cat and none of the good ones!” the shorter girl snaps, and winces. “Well, not _none_ of the good ones, but… you think anyone who isn’t exactly like you is weaker, and you think that makes you better than the rest of us. And it’s mean and it’s stupid and it’s nasty!”

The other girl swallows, looks away, then clears her throat and meets the short one’s eyes. “You may be right,” she says, speaking as if her teeth hurt her. “I… I’m sorry.” She clears her throat, brushes back her endless streams hair. “I’ll try to do better.”

“Oh.” The small one blinks, wrinkling her nose, then shrugs and smiles, shaking the argument off along with the grit in her mess of hair. “Well, I… guess that’s all right then. We’re looking for a huuuge twisty shell, right?” And with that, she’s bounding off across the piles, scrabbling on hands and feet.

“Hey, hang on a second!” The other girl follows her, standing straight, only a little slower as she picks her way across the mess. “I… I don’t have a lot of friends,” she admits, brushing another long long lock of hair behind her shoulder, “but – friends tell each other things like that, right? When one of them is doing something wrong, and no one else will say it?”

Her companion pauses, nose going crinkled again as she tilts her head and contemplates. “Ye-ah,” she says slowly. “It’s kind of a pale thing too, I mean, Darkleer and I do that for each other all the time. And sometimes Crabby – um – he and I –”

“I know.” She smiles up at the smaller girl, who whistles in relief.

“But – yeah, I guess that’s a friend thing.” She crawls back down the pile, managing to scamper without ever standing up until she reaches the fuchsia-blooded girl. “D’you _want_ to be friends?” she asks, stretching up to sniff at her, inquisitive and unabashed. The other girl bites her lip, blushing deep gray-rose.

“Yes,” she admits, and nearly stumbles as the smaller girl launches herself at her. She’s small and hot and wiry in her arms, tangled hair filling the taller girl’s nose, and she smells of must and sugar and the clean smell of fresh sweat.

“You have to be nice to us!” she cautions into the other girl’s hair, prodding her in the shoulder. “But I’ll be your friend on – on faith, since you promised.” She pauses, humming a little; the taller girl hesitantly folds one hand over her shoulders, over the rough scratchy wool of her coat. “You have to roleplay with me, though. Got it?”

The girl who might have been Empress giggles, combing her fingers through the other girl’s hair. “I can do that. May I be a…” She pauses. “Seabird?”

“Yep!” With that she lets go, whirls, goes bounding off. The other giggles again, covering her mouth, then spreads her arms out like wings and starts to run after her.


End file.
